Ash Ghinn: Freeganism

Ash first started rescuing waste food from supermarket bins in 2005.

"I'd heard some unbelievable statistics on UK food wastage and checked the bins at my local Marks and Spencer in Biggin Hill, Kent. I had expected to find spoiled food but it was unbelievable to me that there was so much good food being consigned to landfill.

It soon became obvious that the wastefulness was widespread and I was outraged. My indignation was as much about the amount of waste as by the attitude of staff who would complain that my attempts to recycle what they had thrown away was illegal. I would remonstrate that there should be a law prohibiting anyone from preventing recycling. It was quickly obvious to me that we had a big problem, and we needed to do something about it. I have been living off waste food ever since!

Later that year I sold my house and moved into a campervan with my wife Lucy, wanting to live a simpler and more frugal life. For nearly two years we lived on the streets, and became quite dependent on bins for our survival.

In 2007 we found ourselves a home in Sheffield. Nowadays I do frequent skip runs by car, collecting, boxing and delivering waste food to anyone who would be willing use it, and hoping to foster a "recycling attitude" in a "throw-away culture".

Ash began his talk by showing this 9 minute video. The quality of food that is found in skips is truly astonishing.

SKIPPING DINNER from Camcorder Guerrillas on Vimeo.

Many people presume that "Skipping" for food would be illegal, but it seems goods which have been "abandoned" cannot be deemed stolen, and Freegans claim no one has every been prosecuted in the UK. They are careful not to make a mess, tidying up the area around the bin when they have finished.

A little Googling after the talk revealed an interesting newspaper article summarised as follows.

Food Waste and Freegans
Extracts from a Guardian article by  William Skidelsky

40% of salad is thrown away by British households throw away.

1.6m tonnes of food waste is estimated as produced by British retailers each year.

59,625 tonnes of food waste sent by Sainsbury's to landfill sites in 2007-8.

40% of UK fruit and veg is rejected by supermarkets on cosmetic grounds.

A 2008 survey by the waste organisation Wrap, based on studying a sample of household bins, found that we collectively throw away 6.7m tonnes of food each year.

As a nation, we chuck away 484m unopened yoghurt pots each year, 1.6bn untouched apples (or 27 per person) and 2.6bn slices of bread. All in all, we chuck away roughly a quarter of the food we buy. Yet 84% of households think they don’t waste a significant amount of food………..

……….He opens up one of the bins and picks out a clear plastic sack containing roughly a dozen one-pint cartons of milk – all still within their use-by dates – and a pack of custard doughnuts..

………Back at Waitrose, Stuart sets about investigating the bins……Inside are all manner of edible-looking goodies: sacks of bread, packets of bagels and chocolate doughnuts, endless yoghurts, cartons of soup, individually wrapped pizzas and packets of pre-sliced ham. Most items are within their use-by dates, in some cases by several days…..

Our haul includes two cartons of Duchy Original organic soup ("Prince Charles would hate to see these wasted"), a loaf of bread , celery, carrots and new potatoes, a punnet of juicy-looking strawberries and some cherry tomatoes ("Look at those. They're perfect. Bin ripened!").

Supermarkets reject up to 40% of produce grown because it is of the wrong size or shape…
…… most supermarket special offers are really a sneaky way of pushing their waste on to the consumer. ….. Customers then understandably buy more food than they actually need, a lot of which ends up in the bin."

"Sell-by" and "display until" dates, are "totally unnecessary", should be abolished.

Giving away surplus food is a well-established practice among US supermarkets and many towns and cities have "food banks" where the homeless can pick up this surplus for free.

It is now the policy of some leading sandwich shops and convenience stores (the highest-profile being Pret a Manger) to donate a certain amount of their unsold stock to homeless charities.

Fareshare … leads the way here. It persuades food suppliers and retailers to donate their surplus food, which it then transports to homeless shelters and day centres all over the country through its network of distribution centres (it currently has eight).

"Companies don't simply give us their food; they pay us to take it off their hands. We provide a service," he said. "We dispose of the food for less money than they would have to pay to send it to landfill or recycle it themselves."

Read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/19/freegan-environment-food

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